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$99 BeaglePlay Board Achieves "100% Open-Source" Upstream PowerVR Graphics

Phoronix | Jan. 14, 2026, 10:17 a.m. | Original

Going back many years Imagination PowerVR graphics were widely despised by open-source enthusiasts and Linux desktop users for their lack of an open-source GPU driver. But over the past few years the Imagination PowerVR driver focused on their Rogue graphics IP has matured nicely within the Linux kernel and the PowerVR Vulkan driver in Mesa taking shape too. Paired with Zink for OpenGL over Vulkan, there's a robust open-source PowerVR graphics experience now possible. For those interested in trying out said open-source driver stack, the

GNOME Mutter 50 Alpha Released With X11 Backend Removed

Phoronix | Jan. 14, 2026, 9:48 a.m. | Original

In preparing for the GNOME 50 Alpha release, the "50.alpha" tags just occurred for the Mutter compositor and GNOME Shell. Most notable with GNOME Mutter 50 Alpha is the X11 back-end indeed being removed to focus exclusively on the Wayland session.

The merge " completely drops the whole X11 back-end " with the Wayland session support proving to be in robust shape especially with its state in GNOME 49. XWayland support remains on GNOME for running X11 apps

Linux 7.0 To Focus Just On Full & Lazy Preemption Models For Up-To-Date CPU Archs

Phoronix | Jan. 14, 2026, 9:27 a.m. | Original

A Linux scheduler patch queued up into a TIP branch this past week further restrict is the preemption modes that will be advertised. With it hitting the "sched/core" branch, it will likely be submitted for the upcoming Linux 7.0 (or alternatively, what could be known as Linux 6.20 instead).

Longtime Intel Linux engineer Peter Zijlstra authored the patch to further restrict the preemption modes of the Linux kernel in balancing between throughput and latency of the system. Peter explained with the patch :

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Intel Panther Lake GSC Firmware Published Ahead Of Laptop Availability

Phoronix | Jan. 14, 2026, 8:49 a.m. | Original

While Intel has been upstreaming various Panther Lake firmware bits to linux-firmware.git for pairing with their open-source kernel drivers ahead of Core Ultra Series 3 laptops shipping, one piece of the puzzle only published today is the GSC firmware for the Panther Lake graphics.

The GSC firmware is needed for the Intel Graphics System Controller. Intel GuC and DMC firmware was previously published for Panther Lake but flying under the radar until today was the lack of Panther Lake GSC firmware in linux-firmware.git, the de facto

Intel Compute Runtime Updated With Initial Crescent Island & Nova Lake S Support

Phoronix | Jan. 14, 2026, 6:27 a.m. | Original

The Intel Compute Runtime 26.01.36711.4 was published today as their first release of 2026 for this open-source GPU compute stack providing Level Zero and OpenCL support across their range of graphics hardware going back to Tiger Lake. Notable with this new Compute Runtime release is having now production-ready Panther Lake support while also introducing early support for next-generation hardware.

Following the Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) update earlier this week that introduced Nova Lake and Crescent

XWayland RandR Improvements Merged For Kicking Off 2026 X.Org Server Activity

Phoronix | Jan. 14, 2026, 6:10 a.m. | Original

Michel Dänzer of Red Hat has kicked off 2026 xorg-server activity with landing a patch series enhancing the Resize and Rotate (RandR) extension support under XWayland for improving mode handling by X11 clients.

With the code merged today to the X.Org Server Git, "fake" modes for XWayland's RandR emulation are now sorted by size. This is useful for any scripts relying on the xrandr output and assuming that it's sorted by size and for humans glancing at the

New "Thames" Linux Accelerator Driver Posted Along With Companion Gallium3D Driver

Phoronix | Jan. 14, 2026, 5:55 a.m. | Original

Tomeu Vizoso as the open-source developer behind the "Rocket" driver for reverse-engineered Rockchip NPU support , Teflon as a Mesa framework for TensorFlow Lite and NPU uses , and various Etnaviv driver work, has announced his newest creation: Thames.

Thames is a new DRM accelerator driver for Texas Instruments C7x DSPs. The C7x DSPs are found in SoCs like the TI J722S that powers the likes of the BeagleY-AI.

Open Source LLM

ZLUDA Boasts Full Llama.cpp Support, Better Windows Handling For CUDA On Non-NVIDIA GPUs

Phoronix | Jan. 13, 2026, 8:39 p.m. | Original

The open-source ZLUDA project for bringing CUDA to non-NVIDIA hardware that can run unmodified is out with a new progress report. ZLUDA had a productive fourth quarter with now enjoying better Microsoft Windows support, full support for running Llama.cpp atop ZLUDA, AMD ROCm 7 support, and other enhancements.

ZLUDA developers had hoped to provide robust PyTorch support by the end of 2025 but that didn't quite turn out. But the Llama.cpp support using the NVIDIA CUDA back-end is now

Hangover 11.0 Released: Wine + FEX/Box64 Pairing For Windows x86 Apps On ARM64 Linux

Phoronix | Jan. 13, 2026, 8:22 p.m. | Original

Building off today's release of Wine 11.0 for enabling countless Windows applications and games to run well under Linux and being the basis of Valve's Proton for Steam Play, Hangover 11.0 is now available. Hangover is the open-source project that pairs Wine with either the FEX-Emu or Box64 emulators for enabling x86 32-bit and 64-bit Windows games/apps to run on native ARM64 Linux systems.

With Hangover you can leverage

JPEG-XL Image Support Returns To Latest Chrome / Chromium Code

Phoronix | Jan. 13, 2026, 2:38 p.m. | Original

To the frustration of many developers and end-users, back in 2022 Google deprecated JPEG-XL support in Chrome/Chromium and proceeded to remove the support . That decision was widely slammed and ultimately Google said they may end up reconsidering it . In November there was renewed activity and interest in restoring JPEG-XL within Google's image web browser and as of yesterday the code was merged.

JPEG-XL image support is back in the very latest Google Chrome/Chromium codebase. Back in December they

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